If you’ve got a resource-hungry app, Google Compute Engine’s latest offering has you covered. It lets you dial up to 96 CPUs and an other-worldly 624 GB of memory. Remember Bill Gates allegedly asking who would ever need more than 640K of memory. He obviously didn’t see this coming.
If you think that’s a lot, you aren’t kidding, and believe it or not it’s a big boost from just last March when GCE announced an offering with 64 CPU cores and 416 GB of memory. Those numbers seem quaint now.
The chips, as you might expect are the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors (which were codenamed Skylake). According to Google, these babies scream with up to 20% faster compute performance, 82% faster high performance computing (HCP) power along with almost two times the memory bandwidth compared with the previous generation of Intel’s Xeon line (because you can never have enough performance, can you?).
If you don’t need that much power (what is wrong with you?) or you want to mix and match, depending on what you’re running, Google lets you dial up custom CPU and memory configurations to suit your workload requirements.
The company points out that these new workloads are certified for running SAP HANA workloads. That’s the German software giant’s in-memory database product and this puppy gives you a heck of a lot of memory if you require it.
If 624 gigs doesn’t meet your needs, fear not. The company is working on products that deliver up to 4TB of memory. Stay tuned, but be sure to have your pocket book open. These surely don’t come cheap. Today’s model starts at approximately $4.95 per hour.